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The Via Media of the Anglican Church (Illustrated)

Opinion: Anglicans and the Via Media - U.s

We rejoice in the Anglican via media, a church which is both catholic and reformed, with a robust outlook that puts dialogue before dogma and practical involvement in the community before theological posturing.

The biggest area of potential of the Communion lies in the 70% of Anglicans who represent the Anglican via media, or“middle way”, as expounded by Richard Hooker.

Via Media - Episcopal Diocese of Virginia

Via media Wednesday, November 12, 2008

ANGLICAN COMMONWEALTH VIA MEDIA ANGLICANA Embraced elements of Sacramental (Catholic), Social Estate (Lutheran) and Covenantal(Calvinist) MARRIAGE IS – A symbol of divine life – A social unit of the earthly kingdom – A solemn covenant between the partners 35

Even more troubling, however, is what such a position allows us — and via media rhetoric can be adopted by all parties — to do to our opposition: right-thinking and reasonable does not have a legitimate opposite. When an overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, middling to aged population with establishment Western values is the position of moderation, what does that do to our perceptions of a 21-year-old Nigerian woman (supposedly the average member of the Anglican Communion these days)? Within American political life today, a disastrous nostalgia for the supposedly normal 1950s and a perception of it as the golden age of the middle class creates a tendency to see any adjustment in the areas of race or gender politics as an attack on the delicate equilibrium or cosseted aspidistra that is the system of American values. We need to be very careful that the Anglican via media, precisely insofar as it characterizes itself as benign and moderate, does not continue the fine British imperial tradition of infantilizing anything and anyone standing in its way.

The Continuum: Via Media refined

The cherished Episcopal notion that we are a church of right-thinking, reasonable people is going to be the death of us. I am all for right thinking and reason in equal measure, and indeed compromise, and some sort of Anglican via media — literally, a middle way — may be the solution to the church’s agonizing about its identity. But moderation as the keynote of any sort of Christian identity is deeply problematic (ahem, Laodicea) not least because the hidden sting in the tail of the via media is that it demonizes conflict. We do not fight; we’re right-thinking, reasonable people who already know the right, reasonable solution to whatever it is that we are not fighting about. The paradox, and indeed the curse of the via media, is that it is not something you can assume to have achieved, or even assume you will be able to achieve, in advance because you or your tradition has always done so in the past. The surest way not to arrive is to assume that you are already there.